One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back
into the darkness of the ark -- Kafka

Saturday, December 20, 2014

The "Unabridged" Journals of Sylvia Plath

Will drop Camus (early essays) in favor of Plath's journals. At least for the holidays. Been itching to read them ever since I downloaded them a few weeks back (all started with me going back to her daddy and bee poems). Now I have the time.

I read a poem by Louis Macneice ("Aubade"), and quotes from Yeats and Joyce. Then come her opening lines:

July 1950 -- I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...